Commandant of auschwitz autobiography in five short
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The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as they walked by. This situation renders his entire testimony worthless from a historiographic point of view. 92-95.
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Commandant Of Auschwitz
Brief Summary
Commandant Of Auschwitz by Rudolf Hoess is a chilling autobiographical account from the man who was in charge of Auschwitz, one of the most notorious extermination camps of the Holocaust.
In 1934 he was attached to the SS at Dachau, on August 1, 1938, he was adjutant of Sachsenhausen concentration camp until his appointment as Kommandant of to the newly-built camp at Auschwitz early 1940, located nearby the provincial Polish town of Oshwiecim in Galacia.
May 1941 the SS commander Heinrich Himmler said to Hoess, that Adolf Hitler had given orders 'for the final solution of the Jewish question.
He was sentenced to death, and returned to Auschwitz to be hanged on the one-person gallows outside the entrance to the gas chamber.
Rudolf Hoess related before his execution how he often felt weak-kneed at having to push hundreds of screaming, pleading children into the gas chambers:"I did, however, always feel ashamed of this weakness of mine after I talked to Adolf Eichmann.
Such a camp never existed, and as the former deputy inspector of concentration camps, Höss knew which camps existed in Poland, and what their names were. The main target of this speech was Hans Kammler, head of Office Group C (Budget and Construction) of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office. The theme of ideological indoctrination is also prevalent, highlighting how Hoess and his colleagues justified their actions under the guise of duty and nationalism.
52f., 138.)
Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess
Rudolf Hoess was a German SS officer during the Nazi era who, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, was convicted for war crimes. In the crowded cells, death came instantaneously the moment the Zyklon B was thrown in.
During his imprisonment, at the request of the Polish authorities, he wrote his memoirs, released in English under the title Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess. His appearance even impressed most German defendants at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, who, until then, did not believe their accusers’ mass-murder claims.
He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. The remainder of the total number of victims included about 100,000 German Jews, and great numbers of citizens, mostly Jewish, from Holland, France, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, or other countries. I received all orders for carrying out these mass executions directly from RSHA.
The 'Final Solution' of the Jewish question meant the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe.
In fact, the timeline of the entire orthodox Auschwitz narrative depends on it. Höss insisted that the order came after other extermination camps had already been active for some time. I must even admit that this gassing set my mind at rest, for the mass extermination of the Jews was to start soon, and at that time neither Eichmann nor I was certain as to how these mass killings were to be carried out.
He burned the corpses on an iron grill, in the open air. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants.
After the bodies were removed our special Kommandos took off the rings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses.
Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chamber to accommodate 2000 people at one time whereas at Treblinka their 10 gas chambers only accommodated 200 people each. At that time, there were already in the General Government three other extermination camps: Belzek, Treblinka and Wolzek.
He explained to me that it was especially the children who have to be killed first, because where was the logic in killing a generation of older people and leaving alive a generation of young people who can be possible avengers of their parents and can constitute a new biological cell for the reemerging of this people."
This is excerpts from Hoess' signed testimony given at the Post-War Nuremberg War Crime trials:
RUDOLF FRANZ FERDINAND HOESS, being first duly sworn, depose and say as follows:
"I am fortysix years old, and have been a member of the NSDAPI since 1922; a member of the SS since 1934; a member of the WaffenSS since 1939.
Furthermore, the book inadvertently explores the psychology of a war criminal faced with his own complicity in unspeakable atrocities.
Writing Style and Tone
Hoess writes in a straightforward and dispassionate style, which in itself is both disturbing and revealing.